Fall in Chicago

It’s been way too long since we updated the blog, yikes! I have a few photos built up to share and a big happy birthday shoutout to Colette (it’s still your birthday here!) and best wishes to send to Colman as he runs the NYC marathon tomorrow! He’s with a group from Sydney who are running to benefit the hospital where Rory was born, specifically the preemie unit, so it’s a real Team Rory effort. Go team!

Also, because it seems crazy to ignore the big items in the news, yay Cubs! The last game of the World Series was amazing to watch, and the city has been super celebratory since the win. And as we go into the final stretch before official election day (though lots of states have early voting so many people have already voted) I wish that Cubs player Jason Heyward would do for the country what he did for the Cubs during the 10th inning 17-minute rain delay and give us a really inspiring pep talk about how much he loves us and how we can do this together and that we have it in us, and we can go out there and win this thing. Oh and by win I mean make the best choice in the voting booth and elect Hillary Clinton! Go Team USA!

And speaking of sports victories, Ireland played the New Zealand All Blacks in rugby today here at Soldier Field, and won after 111 years and 29 tries! It’s been a week of historic sports wins in Chicago. We saw a lot of Irish people downtown today (not so many Kiwis!) and there were banners up about the event. Note the strategic showing of both rugby banners and Cubs flags in the photo!

Switching gears to great views, I went to an event at the Cliff Dwellers club last month and it was a beautiful fall evening with a fantastic view of Millenium Park, the lake, Grant Park, the Art Institute, and much more.

In addition to being Fall, the subseason we’re in is Chicago Humanities Festival season. For three weekends (and some weekdays) in late October / early November, the festival puts on performances, presentations and discussions about a range of topics. This weekend the events are in different buildings downtown, and since it was a really beautiful day out, we rode bikes to the Newberry Library to start the day with a presentation about the history of sleep. Apologies to the speaker for this too brief summary, but sleep as we know it in the last few hundred years is a different experience to what human beings have experienced for the bulk of history, especially pre-electricity. Having said all that, I am really grateful for full nights of sleep.

The leaves were really pretty outside the library. Readers may wonder if the Newberry library is related to Liam and Miles’s elementary school, also called Newberry. Yes! Walter Newberry was an early Chicago businessman who made donations to both.

The trees on the University of Chicago campus are also really bright right now. Here’s the main quad on a very warm day last week. A few classes were being held outside and lots of people were hanging around enjoying what feels like has to be one of our last warm days this year.

This next one requires a bit of explanation. The building below is Levi Hall at the University (formerly known as the Administration Building). A project was done a few years ago to open up a breezeway through the building so that the medical campus (behind where I was standing to take the pic) and the university campus would have more of a connection. It’s actually pretty cool and I think the project was successful in doing this. On Friday morning I walked past and saw the sight shown below – the sun is rising from the east, lighting up the main quad, and glowing through the breezeway. It looked like a portal into a magical world like Oz, like everything east of the breezeway was in technicolor and west of the breezeway it was all black and white.

Note this date – it’s November 5 and we ate dinner outside tonight! We went for tacos along Division Street.

Regular indoor selfie that hasn’t been posted before! Big smiles.